Cornered! is a blog devoted, most of the time anyway, to telecommunications: local and global issues, technology, people and trends from the perspective of someone who's been reporting, analysing and commenting on the industry since the dark ages (BC - before competition). Sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes frivolous. Controversial, analytical, informative, amusing, but never boring; a vehicle for examinations of important issues and observations on my encounters and experiences in an industry where polarised views and hyperbole are the norm.
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Cornered! Fifteen global telcos team to take on Skype - not such a daft idea
Cornered! Fifteen global telcos team to take on Skype - not such a daft idea | Fifteen global telcos team to take on Skype - not such a daft idea |
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| by Stuart Corner | |
| Friday, 09 May 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 2 Number one, it is pretty much a one product company. Sure, Skype has tried to add value with services such as a downloadable 'lie-detector' - an application developed by KishKish that works with the Skype softphone to detect stress levels in the callers' voice; with games, file transfer and a business directory. But look at what this mooted gang of Skype killers has to offer: very long established relationships with their customers; good knowledge of those customers, and most importantly a range of services that span communications information and entertainment across the increasingly converged fixed and mobile worlds. It's long been said that voice will become a free service bundled with all the other services delivered over communication networks, and if anyone is well placed to do this it is these guys: so long as they can manage the cannibalisation of their existing revenue streams. They are all so big that for a long time they could afford to largely ignore the impact of services like Skype on their revenue streams. Those days are now well past and bold measures are called for. To me the idea that 15 of them can come together with common purpose to implement and managed something like this seems less likely than the idea that they might want to. However at the practical level of making the technology work across their disparate interconnected networks: that is what they have been doing ever since the International Telecommunication Union was formed in 1865 to facilitate the interconnection of domestic telegraph networks in Europe. Another possibility is that one major carrier could buy Skype. In April john Donahoe, CEO of Skype's owner eBay told Britain's Financial Times that it could be on the market. He said eBay would review Skype this year to see if it is helping its online auction and PayPal systems. EBay bought Skype for $US2.6 billion in 2005 but in October 2007 wrote down the value of the business to about half this figure. However, not one of the mooted Skype Killer partners has a significant presence among consumers outside its home market. A Skype-like service in the hands of 15 of them properly managed and marketed and integrated with their other offerings could become a much more potent force than Skype owned by one of them alone. How they would manage this to prevent it eating existing revenue streams before alternatives could be sufficiently ramped up is the sixty four million dollar question, but better to try than sit back and watch Skype take over the world.
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